Tokyo Team Camp

It's 2016 and we just had our first ever team camp attended by all of
the team members (and also some family members!). Previously, most of
our team camps were attended only from the engineering team.

The team camp lasted for one week full, or we could say in 5 days.

On day one, Kamal presented about the use of user story and pseudo code
to capture and identify business requirements. It's interesting for me
to see the higher level perspective instead of directly do the code
part. Being into deep: coding everyday, sometimes made me loosing the
bigger picture. Then after lunch, Kamal shared about agile/scrum method
in software development. I've heard about this agile/scrum thing before
but never get into detail of it. And I also saw how they use post it
with different colors to differentiate between main topic and supporting
topic. The interesting part is how we gonna "implement" this post it
approach since we are 100 % working remotely so we don't have the luxury
of looking at the same board.

On day two, Kamal explained the evolution of where to put the business
logic. Starting from the views, models, and service layers. Then in the
afternoon I presented about monitoring log and how to do it
automatically because you don't want to spend your whole afternoon
watching the logs manually right?

On day three we went to Roppongi Hills as part of our Japanese
experience. Roppongi Hills is an area in Tokyo which famous for business
district and contemporary architecture. Oh, Google Tokyo office is
located at Roppongi Hills.

We took the Tokyo subway train - Oedo line to go there. Have you ever
seen Tokyo train map? You better see it. At first I imagined this map
just like a spaghetti. Compare to Melboure Metro train network, Tokyo
train network far more complicated. And the subway, is like very deep
underground. I didn't remember how many elevators we should take to
reach the surface from Roppongi Subway Station. It's like we're deep 10
metres under the ground.

On day four, Aiko joined us. We went to Greater Tokyo Metro Underground
Discharge Channel.
We saw how the Japanese built giant tunnel to prevent an area from
flood. It's amazing how to see how Japanese built this mega structures
to prevent flood and saving lives.

After lunch, we went to Japan
Mint. Japan Mint is a Government
Agency which one of the main tasks is producing JPY coins. Here we saw
how the Japanese coins were made. They also displayed the history of
Japanese coins and special coins for special events such as Olympic
Games, special coins for each of 47 Japanese prefectures and so on.

On day five, we went to Ikebukuro local fire department office. This
fire department office has learning center for visitor. At first, we
learned how to properly use fire suppression. For most of us fire
extinguisher is a common thing but it was my first time pull the pin and
blast the fire extinguisher. After that, we practised how to safely
escape from smoke and use the staircase. Still in the visitor center, we
were having earthquake simulation. Japan is located in an area where
earthquakes are very often happened. Before we ended our visit, we
watched 10-minutes animation video which tells the history of
earthquakes in Japan and how we should face the earthquakes: helping
each others.

During the period of the camp, we also went through presentations on
internal processes, new services we plan to release and also refresher
presentations on how we're building our current services.

Last but not least, to close our team camp, we had our team dinner at
Japanese restaurant. But unfortunately we missed the karaoke part. After
all, it was an amazing week: working and spending time with your
colleagues and their families.

Zaki Akhmad

Engineer

Joined October 2014. Used to be a breaker and now learns how to be a builder, Zaki has long journey in application security. And now he's trying to practice the theory of building a secure application.